I’m still new to UV unwrapping and I’ve so far been practicing applying textures off the internet to models I’ve made. I’ve encountered a few problems so far, mainly with visible seams and blurry or distorted textures. I’m sure this is something a lot of new users tend to experience, so if there’s help I can get, it will be greatly appreciated.
I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure I’m not putting seams in the correct places. However, I also have no idea where the right places are, or should be. The textures on these models, though perhaps not too well-shown here, often becomes distorted and blurry, and usually seamless textures, or textures applied to only a single face, don’t match up, which I believe is due to the arrangement of the UV map itself.
I’m trying to learn UV unwrapping so I can go on to learn substance painter, I’m thinking that maybe I can work around UV issues by designing a texture myself, but I highly doubt it. Clearly, I’m doing something, or likely many things, wrong here, but I don’t know how to improve.
You absolutely can work around seaming issues by designing your own textures-- for example, yes, by using Substance Painter. Really, textures are best when they’re designed around a model and its UV map, rather than the UV map being designed around the texture. A professional is not texturing an apple the way that you’re showing.
What you’re showing is not merely a matter of seams, but of the entire UV map. The best way to see what UV map you might need is to look at the model that texture was designed for. Or, if it’s using a procedural material, don’t use UV, or use UV only with box mapped textures.
To avoid blurriness, use high enough image resolution in your textures, and don’t try to map to a tiny part of the image. To avoid distortion, avoid editing UV maps manually, and instead unwrap with seaming/pinning and unwrap operations (and/or, use “minimize stretch” operation in UV editor.) There are seaming techniques that will minimize distortion, but they depend, at least a little bit, on modelling topology, which isn’t shown in your pic. Consider a cube with a few levels of subdivision-- it has a great UV map out of the box, with the faces arrayed into a (subdivided) cross, but if you seam it into two hemispheres and re-unwrap it, you’ll get terrible distortion.
